What to Move to Open Source in 2026

Key takeaways

Desktops, office suites, mail and calendar, accounting and ERP, design, video, file sharing and camera management all have mature open-source options.
The risks are specific: complex Excel macros, DWG drawing fidelity, specialist or regulated software, and layered files from proprietary design suites.
Life-safety and alarm systems stay with licensed providers and the codes that govern them.
Estimate the saving from your own data: licence spend per employee against one-time migration cost and the yearly cost of running the replacement.
The path is inventory, training before, a pilot group, waves, training after, then operations.
AI agents handle routine updates and fixes, with a person approving anything that matters.
A verdict of keep is a good outcome for a tool that is regulated, specialist or cheap to leave alone.

The short answer

Most of what a typical company pays for by the seat now has an open-source answer that works in daily business: the desktop operating system, the office suite, email and calendar, accounting and ERP, design and video tools, file sharing and even camera management. A smaller group needs care: files that depend on one vendor's format, specialist or regulated software, and life-safety systems. The sensible plan is not all or nothing. It is a verdict for every tool, a pilot before anyone is cut over, training on both sides of the switch, and a saving calculated from your own invoices.

This guide is written for the people who approve the budget. It walks through each category, says what moves easily and what needs care, shows how to estimate the saving without relying on anyone's market statistics, and describes the path and the operations afterwards. It follows the same structure as our Clayton Open Source service, and it includes the cases where we tell a client to keep paying.

Why 2026 is a good moment to look

Open-source desktop and business software has matured, and the projects behind it publish their work openly, so you can read what each one does and how it is released. A company also no longer has to run it alone: the work of installing, updating and fixing can be handled by a managed team backed by AI agents. The question has moved from whether the software exists to whether your particular files, habits and rules fit it. That is a question you can answer with an inventory.

Desktops: Omarchy and other Linux desktops

Omarchy is an opinionated Linux setup with a ready-made desktop, described on its own project site. Other Linux desktops suit people who want something closer to a traditional Windows or macOS layout. For most office roles the machine is a browser, an office suite, mail and a few business applications, so the operating system matters less than people fear.

Moves easily: browser-based work, office documents, mail, chat and video calls, file sharing, and most day-to-day business applications that already run in a browser.
Needs care: software that exists only for Windows or macOS, hardware with special drivers such as unusual scanners or label printers, and users with deep keyboard-shortcut habits.
How we handle it: one tested image, disk encryption, central management and automatic updates, and a short training session before the machine changes. For a tool with no replacement yet, a managed virtual machine can carry it until one is built.

Office suite: LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE and Collabora

LibreOffice is a full desktop office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. ONLYOFFICE and Collabora Online are built around editing documents in a browser, which suits teams that edit together. Each opens common Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

Moves easily: letters, reports, standard spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs. Most staff notice little beyond new menus.
Needs care: complex Excel workbooks with macros written in Visual Basic, add-ins that connect to other systems, unusual fonts, and documents where exact page layout is contractual. Layout can shift slightly between suites.
How we handle it: we scan the real files for macros and external links during the inventory, test the important ones, and rewrite the few macros that matter, often as a small script or a feature in your business application.

Email and calendar on your own servers

Moving email off a hosted subscription means running mail servers you control, with the protections a hosted service gave you included: sender authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, spam and malware filtering, backups and shared calendars and contacts. Nextcloud also offers shared calendars and contacts alongside its files.

Moves easily: mailboxes and history, shared calendars, contacts and distribution lists. Mail can move in one weekend, with the old service kept read-only as a safety net.
Needs care: delivery reputation for a new server, mobile-phone setup, shared mailboxes with special rules, and any integration that expects one particular vendor's service.
Who runs it matters: mail is the system people notice first when it fails, so it needs monitoring, patching and a tested restore.

Accounting and ERP: Odoo and ERPNext

Odoo and ERPNext are open business suites that cover accounting, invoicing, inventory, purchasing, sales and more. ERPNext is built by Frappe and Odoo is published by Odoo S.A.; both describe their modules on their own sites.

Moves easily: customers, vendors, products, open invoices and the chart of accounts. A company with simple, standard processes is often a good fit.
Needs care: years of history, tax and payroll rules for your state or country, bank feeds, and custom reports your finance team relies on. Your accountants and auditors must agree to the cutover date and the reconciliation.
Honest limit: regulated or industry-specific accounting packages, for example for specialised funds or utilities, may stay where they are until a compliant equivalent is proven.

CAD and engineering: FreeCAD, LibreCAD, QCAD and KiCad

FreeCAD is a 3D parametric modeller. LibreCAD and QCAD are 2D drafting tools. KiCad is for electronics: schematics and circuit boards.

Moves easily: new designs, 2D drawings, schematics and boards, and open exchange formats such as STEP and DXF.
Needs care: DWG fidelity. DWG is a proprietary format, and layers, dimension styles, blocks and fonts can come across with small differences. Parametric models built in a commercial package usually cannot be converted feature by feature and may need rebuilding.
Verdict: we test your real drawings before promising anything. A firm whose clients demand DWG deliverables, or whose licence terms or standards require a particular product, may keep a few seats.

Design and photo: GIMP, Krita, Inkscape and Darktable

GIMP and Krita edit and paint raster images, Inkscape draws vector graphics, and Darktable develops raw photos.

Moves easily: everyday image editing, logos and illustrations, social and web graphics, and photo processing.
Needs care: layered Photoshop files with smart objects and effects, print workflows that depend on one colour-management setup, and plug-ins. Simple layers usually survive; effects may not.
A small design team that lives in one proprietary suite may be the last group to move, and may be better kept in the pilot's second wave.

Video: Kdenlive and Shotcut

Kdenlive and Shotcut are open video editors for cutting, titles, effects and export. They cover marketing videos, training material and internal media well.

Moves easily: new projects, standard exports and training or marketing video.
Needs care: existing project files from other editors do not carry over, so finished masters are kept as video files. Broadcast workflows, colour grading suites and special hardware may need a specialist tool.

Files and collaboration: Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a self-hosted platform for files, sharing, calendars, contacts and collaboration. It runs on your own servers or in your own cloud account, so the data stays under your control.

Moves easily: shared drives, sync to laptops and phones, link sharing and permissions.
Needs care: very large archives, deep folder permissions that grew over years, and any external partner who expects a particular vendor's sharing link. Plan the structure before copying, not after.

Cameras and video management: Frigate and ZoneMinder

Frigate is open network-video-recorder software with local object detection, and ZoneMinder is a long-established open camera-monitoring system. They record, review and alert from IP cameras without a per-camera licence.

Moves easily: recording and review of standard IP cameras, motion and object alerts, and retention you set yourself.
Needs care: camera models with proprietary protocols, storage sizing, and evidence handling if footage may be needed in a dispute.
What stays with licensed providers: fire alarms, smoke detection and other life-safety systems. These follow local codes, are installed and inspected by licensed professionals, and are not something to replace with open software. The same goes for monitored burglar alarms where a monitoring contract applies.

Business applications: custom-built

Where no product fits, such as a line-of-business tool, a trading or market-data application, or a workflow built on spreadsheets, the answer is software built for you, with the source code handed over. The advantage is that you own it and it does exactly what the business does. The cost is that someone has to maintain it, which is where the operations model below matters.

What to keep, and why

Open source is not right for every tool. Plan to keep, or to move last, any of these:

Specialist or regulated software where a regulator, insurer, auditor or customer names the product, or where validation is expensive.
Tools tied to an industry data format with no open reader.
Life-safety and alarm systems, which stay with licensed providers and codes.
Anything a vendor must support for a contract to stay valid, such as certain medical or laboratory equipment.
A product whose cost is small and whose switching risk is high. Not every licence is worth chasing.

Keeping a tool is a valid verdict. The saving comes from the many tools you can drop, not from forcing the last ten per cent.

How to estimate the saving

Use your own numbers, not an industry average. The method has two sides, and a spreadsheet is enough.

Current cost: list every paid application and subscription from invoices and card statements. Divide each by the number of people who use it. Add the cost of hardware refreshes that exist only to satisfy a software requirement.
Cost of moving: a one-time project cost (inventory, imaging, mail and data migration, rewriting macros, a pilot) and training time, valued at what a working hour costs you. Add a short period of lower productivity.
Cost of running afterwards: hosting or hardware for mail, files and applications, backups, monitoring, security patching, and support, whether in-house or managed.
The comparison: annual licence spend per employee, minus annual running cost per employee, gives the recurring saving. Divide the one-time cost by that figure to get the payback period. Keep the tools you decided to keep in both columns so the comparison is fair.
Sensitivity: run it again with headcount growth. Per-seat licences rise with every hire, while self-hosted infrastructure rises more slowly. Also run it with a pessimistic training and productivity cost, and see whether it still pays.

If the payback is long for a category, that category waits. If it is short, it goes in the first waves. This is why the inventory comes first.

The migration path

Inventory: every application, subscription and integration, who uses it, which files depend on it, and a verdict for each: replace, rebuild, keep or retire.
Training before: role-based sessions, a cheat sheet and a named person to ask, so the new desktop is familiar before it is the only one.
Pilot group: a few people from every department work for real on the new setup. What breaks for them is fixed before anyone else moves.
Waves: desktops move in groups, often over a weekend, with a rollback for each step. Mail moves in one weekend, with the old service read-only as a safety net.
Training after: a second round, weekly office hours and a priority line during the first weeks.
Operations: licences are cancelled one by one as each replacement proves itself, and a final report compares savings with the plan.

How AI agents keep it running

The common worry about self-hosted software is who maintains it. In our model, AI agents do the routine work on your own infrastructure: they apply updates, watch logs, fix known faults, restore from backups in tests and build requested features. A person approves anything that matters, such as a change to money, access or customer data, and steps in when an agent cannot resolve a problem. The aim is that running the platform does not grow with every product you add.

What we have seen at 100 people

We ran this on ourselves: a 100‑person company now uses Omarchy desktops, an open-source office suite, its own mail servers and custom software. The lesson is that the technology was rarely the obstacle. The main work was in the inventory, in the few files that needed attention and in training. Your result will differ, which is why the pilot exists.

Where to start

Start with the inventory and the verdicts. It is a short exercise, it gives your finance team a real saving figure, and it shows which categories to move first. Clayton Open Source includes it, with training before and after the switch and a pilot group before anyone is cut over.

Sources

This article is general information, not legal, accounting or fire-safety advice. Check licence terms, regulatory duties and local codes for your own tools, and test your own files before you rely on a replacement. Last reviewed November 10, 2026.

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What Your Company Can Move to Open Source in 2026, and What to Keep